Let Us Play, Blizzard!

Yesterday I talked about how some friends and I on different servers who wanted to PvP together have had to level characters to 19 on a new server to do so. What’s more, we’re unlikely to ever level together far enough to play AV or Arena.

I suspect I’m not the first person to make the following suggestions. I suspect I’m probably more like the (hundred?) thousandth. But humor me… can someone explain to me why Blizzard erects such huge barriers to PvP participation?

If it were up to me, I’d tweak WoW PvP as follows:

– Award XP for PvP. The amounts would be small enough such that it would not be a meaningful incentive for more world PvP, but would make battlegrounds an effective way to level a character. I’d be happy even if the rate of progress was somewhat less than through PvE.

– Ditch level requirements for battlegrounds and arena play. The only reasoning I’ve been able to come up with for these restrictions is a fear that the population will be diluted by twitch players who really don’t experience the “world” of Warcraft, but I don’t buy that logic — you need to participate in PvE to get effective gear for PvP. Are there other reasons? A lesser compromise would be to have access to battlegrounds and arena play be account-wide flags which are set the first time a character reaches the level threshold, so I don’t have to level an alt up to 70 to form an arena team with a friend on another server.

– Narrow the battleground level brackets. They should be about 3 levels wide instead of 10. Include more servers in the battlegroups where necessary to keep the populations at a reasonable level. Right now, battlegrounds are pretty much pointless until you’re at the high end of the range for your level bracket.

I do like PvE very much, but I hate having it tied to my PvP game like a ball and chain.

Like this:

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6 thoughts on “Let Us Play, Blizzard!”

You may want a switch to be able to turn of PvP xp gain for each character. If you like PvPing at level X, you will not want to be forced from there.

City of Heroes/Villains deals with this by setting everyone to the max level for each PvP zone, sidekicked or exemplared. Of course, the lower level characters still get steamrolled because they do not have the same powers, enhancement, etc. but at least their numbers are scaled appropriately.

They could do kind of like Guild Wars, and let you roll a new character on PvP servers that’s already leveled to 60. So after character creation you end up with a character, skill points to spend however you want, no money and some standard low quality gear.

You’d still have to PvP it up to get it to 70 and remain competitive, not to mention geared, but at least you are able to start at 60.

Definitely award XP for PVP, if you so choose. In fact, it would add a whole new element to leveling, which would be a much needed change.

I have 6 characters overy level 60. Each one is more painful than the last. I would love the option to try and level via PVP, would be a whole new experience.

It would also be easy to work out. Currently, you get an epic for every month you are on an arena team, for the most part, regardless of skill. It takes roughly 8-10 days to get a character to level 60, (playtime), so skew the XP that participating in PVP for the same period of time nets you the levels. Ditto for 60 to 70.

XP for PvP would be very nice, as long as they also make lvling optional, or (at the very least) that xp gain for pvp optional.

As for lvl requirements for BGs, if you mean having to be lvl 10, that just seems to make sense, since there’s very few abilities available before lvl 10 for much of anything. I suppose you could technically do it, but you might want to check out what 10-19 BGs are like right now. A lot of just running away, and spamming 3-4 buttons. While that isn’t always the case, at lvl 10 it becomes 3-4 buttons for real; maybe fewer.

If you’re talking about needing lvl 70 for arena and AV, AV is kind of understandable, since it is definately designed in size for people with mounts. Also, Blizzard would have to adjust all the mob lvls for each bracket. It would be nice if they made it smaller and lower lvl mobs for lower brackets, but I doubt they’ll put in the effort. As for arena, someone actually asked the pvp panel at Blizzcon about giving arena ratings at lower brackets, and they said they were considering it. So that might happen. Maybe. >.

Exp for PvP – Twinking goes away. Not many will be happy with that. In addition, Blizzard very much prizes their leveling through quests model. Remember PvP was an afterthought in WoW. Blizzard thinks exp for pvp is subject to exploitation, they’ll never do it.

Level requrements ditching – Blizzard very much places the carrot at 70. They will constantly press you to level up. It’s by design and won’t change. The masses won’t buy as many expansions if they are happy at 19.

Narrowing the battleground brackets – Has been tried. Not enough people que in your level range to start a battleground. There is already at 70 WSG, 70 AB, 70 EotS. AV is freeflowing for those that wish. It’s already balanced.

[…Exp for PvP – Twinking goes away. Not many will be happy with that. In addition, Blizzard very much prizes their leveling through quests model. Remember PvP was an afterthought in WoW. Blizzard thinks exp for pvp is subject to exploitation, they’ll never do it…]

The twinking issue could be addressed by an enable/disable PvP XP flag, as Zubon mentioned. (Personally, I think this would only be necessary because people have already spent a lot of time building twinks. If this were being implemented at launch, I don’t think a flag would be necessary; twinking seems to me an odd side effect of a broken gameplay model.)

As for exploitation, what sort? The basic scenario I imagine is some friends suiciding to each other repeatedly, and this can be addressed by limiting the XP one gets from killing the same person too frequently. Seems to me there are far more complicated forms of exploitation in PvE (e.g. unattended combat macros)… you can never keep this sort of thing to zero, but Blizzard does a good enough job of keeping it under control where it doesn’t ruin the game for everyone else.

[…Level requrements ditching – Blizzard very much places the carrot at 70. They will constantly press you to level up. It’s by design and won’t change. The masses won’t buy as many expansions if they are happy at 19….]

Do you think the masses would suddenly be happy at 19 if these changes were implemented? I don’t. People would still want to level up, and if some people started hanging out at lower levels, expansion content could be geared towards them instead. There are other ways to create a player horizon besides more levels.

Ditching the level requirements for PvP doesn’t suddenly remove the PvE leveling horizon; it just allows people interested in PvP to play the game the way they want to play, when they want to play, with whom they want to play. In this particular example, these things all seem to me like they would increase subscriber longetivity.

[…Narrowing the battleground brackets – Has been tried. Not enough people que in your level range to start a battleground. There is already at 70 WSG, 70 AB, 70 EotS. AV is freeflowing for those that wish. It’s already balanced…]

As I said above, can’t this be addressed by creating larger server groups?

Also, to be clear, I don’t really expect Blizzard to change any of these things. The issues are so obvious that I assume they must have intentionally chosen to leave things the way they are. My question is why — why is Blizzard so attached to their PvE leveling model?